64 comments:

Same OLD shtick. Such courage to take on the Church, such controversy! I can hear the self-congratulation now. Call me when she strips out of a burka on stage, dangles off a crescent moon or impersonates Mohammad. Then I will call her controversial and courageous.

Desperation isn't pretty to watch. "Look at me! Please look at me! Tell me I'm still relevant!" With all the money she's made, and the success she's inexplicably enjoyed (reading the reviews for Ray of Light, one might have expected it would actually not be shit), you would have thought she would developed enough self-esteem to not crave validation so much.

Another case of attention deficit disorder of the adolescent type noted of certain professional athletes, movie stars and other entertainers (but not to be confused with the learning disability with a similar name often treated with Ritalin).

Sip and Elizabeth have it nailed with the comparisons to Liberace and the rocker Marilyn Manson.

Keith Richards' hapless recent tree climbing adventure at age 60 plus might also be an example.

Someone has invested mega-millions in this bizarre tour. I've never seen one of her tours, nor would I be interested in buying her music. But the nuttiness of the "idea" behind her presentation, coupled with the relentless focus on the profit column for the record company footing the bill for the whole thing, presents an intriguing contrast.

If it's true as other commenters say that all of this is old hat, just a repackaging of what she's done before, then who do imagine is the target audience for this? Whether or not this s-m cum Catholic thing is Madonna's hang-up, the marketing types at the record company must have a business plan to recoup those mega-millions. I wonder what it is.

It is funny how word associations often govern blog comments, and how the patterns set off the same associations in different people at the same time.

I remember hearing the other use of ADD on a sportscast when Julius Erving (Dr. J) was doing color commentary on an NBA playoff game.

He described the exhibitionistic Dennis Rodman as suffering from that affliction. When the play by play guy tried to correct him, pointing out that ADD was a learning disability, Dr. J merely said to him, "think about it for a minute".

At that point, the pbp announcer started laughing, saying, "now I see what you mean -- he's never going to get enough attention, is he?".

FWIW, the Madonna story is below the “fold” on the Drudge Report almost directly below the story about the cloned mules. Make of that what you will.

Personally I never cared much for Drudge (and yes I said the same thing during Clinton’s impeachment) as the site is pretty much all gossip and scandal-mongering with the occasional FREAK and DISASTER story thrown in.

We may be talking about her, but it doesn't sound as if many (any?) of us will be buying her album or a ticket to this latest pageant. Free publicity is great if it translates into dollars. These days, there are so many content-starved media outlets that I'm not inclined to believe that all press coverage automatically translates into a boost in sales.

Certain things gain notoriety, and wheedle their way into conversations, not because they are of true interest or importance, but because they are minor irritants, like mosquitos or dandruff.

Lacking the cultural equivalent of Off! or Head and Shoulders, I'll have to be satisfied with mockery. When my little brother made himself a similar pest, I sat on him. Can't someone sit on Madonna for awhile?

We're big on pageants down south, with our Yam Queens, Miss Cochon de Lait, and Miss Chicken of Tomorrow, but even in the most Catholic of parishes I've never heard of Miss Crucifixion. Can you see them having to pry that thing off the brow of last year's now-anemic winner?

I like the new album, "Confessions on a Dance Floor," as I said back here. I praised the new video from it here. I praised the technique for composing the Confessions album here. Anyway, there are many old posts about Madonna, most of them quite positive. So that attempt at showing my "evolution" with 3 posts is completely inaccurate. (Like the rest of X's research?)

Mary, sounds like an elementary school science fair--everyone's a winner!

I'd be pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, if someday soon we get to see Madonna do a tour of standards, just her in a to die for dress, some Cole Porter, accompanied on piano. What a swell party that would be.

Elizabeth- The problem with that scheme is that Madonna can't actually sing. She would have done this by now if she could. Her voice is usually processed in such a way that it's just another electronic noise in the dance beat. Cher discovered the same technique and started the loathesome trend of maxing out the digital pitch correction software to get that irritating effect that she used in "Believe". Since then, every pop trollop (male and female) has been processed and reprocessed to make at least nominally "acceptable" sounds come out of those over-developed frames. Madonna would as soon perfom standards with a mic and a piano as get photographed under bright fluorescent lights without makeup.

Sinead O'Connor actually sort of pulled a standards-with-simple-orchestration project off years ago if I recall, but she was already an actual, you know, singer.

I'd be pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, if someday soon we get to see Madonna do a tour of standards, just her in a to die for dress, some Cole Porter, accompanied on piano. What a swell party that would be.

Well, Courtney Love tried it, and look how her career turned out! (The dressed up/cleaned up part, that is).

Palladian, there's no comparison b/w Sinead and Madonna, agreed. Madonna is a better singer now than when she began her career; at least she's mainly past the nasally, higher-pitched stuff of Who's that Girl.

I thought of Britney when this discussion started, since a few years back there was this manufactured image of her as Madonna's protege. But Britney isn't even a bad singer; she's no singer at all. She's got nothing, and worse, no imagination. Madonna seriously overrates her creativity, but she's self-made all the way. Britney is a sad thing, a marginally talented Jazzercise dancer with pimps for parents. I doubt there'll be a Britney career in 20 years.

Pope to Monsignor Fang: "Madonna? Didn't JPII excommunicate her or something a couple years before I got here? Wha? Oh, that was that bald O'Connor fellow, the tiger and the lizzard, or whatever? Hmmmm... no, nevermind. Don't bother, really. I'm *sure* it offends God, I just don't think she matters that much. Now about that spaetzle..."

On the merits, never has a woman who pushed sex so hard, been so sexually unappealing to me. She's like a lot of pro sports teams: on paper, she looks pretty strong. But when you get right down to it, there just isn't a lot of play there, probably never was.

Seriously, this is why famous people give kabbalah a bad name. Frolicking like a whore and offensively skewering others' religious symbols - classy way to express the piety and deep sense of G-d that comes from true kabbalistic study...Wow, I sound judgmental! Oh well, I can at least admit I have a ways to go in my personal development, and not spew it all over the world as "entertainment".

The BBC has a clip of her 'performance' on their website, and as Palladian noted above, she can't actually sing, as you'll find as she hits a few clunkers. Plus she features slides of her x-rays and video of her riding accident on the screen behind her. How self-indulgent is that?